Our journey started about 3 weeks ago. Steve had noticed a lump under his right arm and it had been there for quite awhile. At first we thought it may have been just a swollen lymph node. Steve had been feeling kind of run down and tired for awhile so our thoughts were that it was his body just trying to fight something off. When I needed to go to the doctor to get an antibiotic for a sinus infection I was fighting, we decided to have the doctor check out the lump in his armpit. The doctor felt it and seemed a bit concerned and told us that it was big enough that whatever it was it needed to come out. We kind of got nervous at that time. Steve decided he wanted a second opinion. He called up another friend that was a doctor and had him take a look that same night. This doctor seemed to think that it was only a cyst and that we had no need to worry. He did say it was to big and needed to come out. At this point we knew that we needed to find a surgeon and just go get it removed. The following week Steve met with the surgeon and he told us that it wasn't a cyst, it was in fact a lymph node. He also told us not to worry that only about 4% of all the lymph nodes they remove are cancerous. That gave us a 96% chance that we would have this surgery and about a 2 week healing period then we would be back to our normal, crazy out of control, busy life as we knew it. Not the case. Steve went in for surgery the very next morning and the doctor removed not one but 2 lymph nodes. The big one we could feel was 5 cm. That was bigger than the doctor thought. The other one was 2 cm. Off to pathology they went. They told us it would take about a week before we would get any results back from pathology. The next day is when we got our world rocked. At lunch our family doctor called us on the phone to tell us that the preliminary pathology report was in and that is was positive for cancer. She said she would leave the report at the front desk if we wanted to come get it and read it for our selves. Our wost fears were now staring us right in the face. Cancer!!! That is what other people get, not Steve. He is one healthy guy. Never missed a day of work in the last 15 years. Maybe even longer but that is how long we have been married and how long we have had our own business. He is just "freakishly healthy" and one of my sister once said. Now what??? Our doctor told us that we needed to go down to Salt Lake City to the Huntsman Cancer Institute and get started down there as soon as possible. When we first were considering that it may be cancer we thought it might be lymphoma. That sounded really scary but we have a friend who just got done with his Chemo and is doing really well. Also the success with treating lymphoma was really high. We thought if he's got cancer at least it's a "good one" to get. But who wants cancer? Then we looked a little closer at the pathology report and it said Metastatic malignant melanoma! What the HECK! We looked all over his body and couldn't find a single spot that looked unusual to us. I'm not trained to find cancerous moles but I thought I might be able to see something suspicious. A flood of many different emotions came over us. We were scared, mad, sad, frustrated, and unsure of what lie ahead for us. Steve went back to work and pretended nothing was wrong and I went to my sister that lives close by and had a good cry for just a few minutes then it was time to get busy figuring out what to do next. I called down to the Huntsman Cancer Institute and talked to a guy there. I told him I needed an apt. for my husband who was just diagnosed with cancer. He asked what kind of cancer he had? He asked me to fax the pathology report down to them and he would have the melanoma doctors look at it then he would call me back. Well, he didn't. He had no idea he would be dealing with. He did say that the doctors would want him to have a full body PET scan and a Brain MRI. Than gave me something to do in the mean time. I called our doctor and asked her to send over an order for the scans they told me that we would need to the hospital marked urgent! I'm not the most patient person when I'm on a mission. I wanted to have the scans done and I wanted to be effective with our time. They only do the scans once a week and they only had one opening left for the next Monday. Come Hell or high water that appointment was going to be ours. We got both scans done on the same day. Talk about an emotional day. I think it was here at the Huntsman extension up here in Logan that the reality set in for both of us of what we were about to face. Steve was given a choice of Banana or berry flavored barium to drink for his PET scan. We ask the guy which one was better? He told us that they weren't bad and both were fine. So Steve picked banana. Both sounded awful to me. I went out to wait in the waiting room. There I was surrounded with different cancer patients waiting to receive their treatments. They were talking to one another about how they were feeling and what was going on with them. Now it was real! My stomach felt like I was going to throw up! I had to get out of there. It was still to new for me and my emotions and feelings were still to raw. I got up and went into the education room where I sat alone and talked on the phone with one of my sisters. Steve text-ed me while I was waiting for him. He had just drank the banana barium. He had to wait 45 minutes for it to travel through his body before they could start the scan. He said "the guy lied, said it wasn't bad" .
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